Category: Unity

Sometimes it’s useful to see the 3d world you are creating from multiple different angles simultaneously. Many 3D programs like 3Ds Max even offer quad views that have four different angles available. In Unity you can view your scene from multiple angles in the editor by right-clicking on the scene window tab at the top and choosing “add tab” and then “scene”. You can now drag and drop this new scene window tab to a place in the interface that you prefer and change it’s view angle to your liking. One way of working could for example be to have always one top view available and next to that one free view.

The workflow between Cycles and Unity hasn’t been very optimal because the FBX exporter in Blender doesn’t support the node based Cycles materials. Blender 2.8 brings significant improvement to the game developer workflow along with it’s new glTF exporter and the Eevee render engine. Here we have a PBR textured public domain asset in EEVEE. We can select materials and check how the nodes are mapped to the principled shader. We have a standard RGB image for the albedo/base color input. The metallic and roughness texture maps are just grayscale images, so for the sake of efficiency they have been mapped to to blue and green channels of an RGB image. And we have a normal map plugged into the normal input via the normal map node. Let’s see how easy it is to transfer all of this into Unity. I’ll select the entire object hierarchy by control clicking the parent object in the outliner. The let’s go to file, export, glTF 2.0. Let’s only export the selected objects by checking this checkbox. There are plenty of other options as well and the glTF standards supports also animations, including shape keys. While Blender is working, let’s prepare Unity for the import by downloading the UniGLTF package from Github. Well simply install this as a custom package and now we have the UniGLTF menu option up here, from which we can choose import. Unity want’s us to save the imported objects as a prefab so let’s do that. Now this does take some time, so we’ll speed up the video a bit here. After the import has finished, we can simply drag the prefab into our scene and marvel at how Unity has automatically placed all the texture maps correctly. This will make the life of game developers a lot easier. Thanks for watching and see you next time on one minute video tutorials dot com.

This tutorial shows you how you can bring alpha mapped planes into Unity while keeping the transparency intact:

1. Import the 3d-model as an asset
2. Import the texture as an asset and toggle the “Alpha is transparency” checkbox on. Apply.
3. Drag the 3d-model to your scene
4. Drag and drop the texture on top of the 3d-model
5. Select the object and open it’s shader in the inspector. Change the rendering mode from “opaque” to “fade” or “transparent”